Can Movie Screenings on Demand Save Hollywood?

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LAS VEGAS —Moviegoers and Hollywood both lose out when people
can't find screenings of an anticipated film anywhere nearby. But
on-demand film showings offer a possible solution for enabling
sold-out screenings at local movie theaters.

The solution comes from new startups, such as Tugg or Gathr,
aimed at helping smaller films find paying movie theater
audiences. They work somewhat like the
crowd-funding website Kickstarter — a film screening reaches
a tipping point and gets scheduled when enough moviegoers have
registered to see the film at a local movie theater.

"Tugg came from the frustration we felt as filmmakers over the
disconnect between films and audiences," said Nick Gonda,
cofounder of Tugg. He represented one of four panelists during a
Variety-hosted event here at the Consumer Electronics
Show (CES) on Jan. 9.

Gonda's startup helped set up early screenings for the 2012 film
"Sinister" and enabled 100 nationwide screenings for the
Nazis-in-space film "Iron Sky" — all based on screenings proposed
by individual people for their local movie theaters. Tugg also
helped Matthew Lillard, an actor and director, set up screenings
for his indie film "Fat Kid Rules the World" after it won an
audience award at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival.

The startup Gathr has used a similar approach to get
locally-demanded screenings for documentaries such as Ken Burns'
"The Central Park Five," "Big Easy Express" and "Something from
Nothing: The Art of Rap."

Huge movie theater chains such as AMC Theatres have begun to show
interest in the targeted-screening approach. Despite
record-breaking box office sales in 2012, Hollywood has worried
about a declining audience attendance in recent years (2012 was
an exception). [ 13
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AMC Theatres has many empty seats to fill because it shows 400 of
the 600 Hollywood films that come out each year as the
second-largest U.S. distributor. Smaller indie films or
documentaries that have local crowd support could fill those
empty theater seats with the help of a Tugg or Gathr.

"What we're trying to do is find partners and ideas where we can
fill seats, we can engage guests and we can support filmmakers,"
said Hank Green, vice president of studio partnerships at AMC
Theatres.

The Tugg and Gathr approaches have the added advantage of
empowering individual film fans who can organize local film
screenings and connect directly to friends or fellow film-lovers.
Such fans could do more to fill local movie theaters than
Selena Gomez might accomplish by tweeting about a film to her
millions of Twitter followers.

"One thing we found at Tugg is that we're seeing curators emerge
all over country who can sell out films at two of their local
theaters," Gonda said. "They represent someone in the community
whom people can look right in the eye and trust more than [film
critic] Roger Ebert."

Some tech solutions for small filmmakers have skipped
movie theaters entirely— IndieFlix has offered a
movie-streaming subscription service that pays filmmakers for
every minute that people watch online. But it has used
successfully used film screenings held at places such as
Starbucks cafes or schools to raise awareness of its films.

"It takes a village to raise a child," said Scilla Andree, CEO
and cofounder of IndieFlix. "Our movies are our children. We need
a community to help launch our films."